PARK DISTRICT REVAMP OUTLINED

Fred Marc BiddleCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Details of the proposed reorganization of the Chicago Park District were explained Wednesday night for about 150 park employees and representatives of local park advisory councils by Jesse Madison, park district executive vice president, who called the plan ''a management structure that makes sense.''

Essentially a decentralization of responsibility to what Madison called

''the user level,'' the 13 existing departments would be reorganized into five: parks and recreation, administrative services, special services, finance and employment.

Each of these departments would answer to the executive vice president, through the assistant general superintendent. The reason for the

reorganization was improved accountabilty, Madison said.

For example, Madison said, no one administrator now is responsible for the maintenance and deployment of all park district vehicles. Rather, the vehicles are the responsibility of the managers of the departments to which they are assigned. Under the new proposal, a superintendent of administrative services would now oversee an executive responsible for the management of the park district`s 800-vehicle fleet.

That same superintendent of administrative services also would oversee an expanded graphics department that would supply all park departments not just the public information department it now serves.

The most important new position, however, would be the superintendent of parks and recreation, which Madison called ''the park`s czar.''

The agency`s recreation department would be restructured, and an experienced ''parks professional'' would be named to an executive-level position. Also, a host and regional park system giving individual park managers more decision-making authority would begin on a pilot basis by July. Previously, most of the power was structured around Edmund Kelly, former general superintendent, and his director of engineering. Kelly was ousted by forces loyal to Mayor Harold Washington last June, amid charges that the department was one of the city`s last outposts of patronage employment.

Madison also proposed that the park district`s associate general superintendent be the liaison to all other city agencies and oversee a director of security services and a director of inspections and

investigations.

''We need the ability to ferret out not only corrupt activities but untoward activities,'' Madison said.

Aside from the associate general superintendent, a director of external affairs would oversee the new position of marketing manager whose job would be ''to sell the park district`s products'' and would have the ''gigantic task of the park district`s public image,'' Madison said.

Madison`s proposal also calls for a civil service board to begin testing some of the park district`s approximately 4,000 employees.

Madison`s plan borrows parts of a proposal by Walter Netsch, park board president, submitted last November. Netsch`s proposal was aimed at ridding the system of its historic patronage bureaucracy by tightening credentials for its top employees, as well as increasing hiring of women and minorities. The park district would be divided into 21 semi-independent regions, each with its own manager and a central host park.

Each host park, in turn, would serve as the management center for 14 to 40 area parks, pools, and playlots.

Dolores M. Collins, a member of the Loyola Park Advisory Council who later expressed ''reservations'' about the plan, but, like many audience members, had not completely reviewed it, questioned the role of individual park supervisors following the reorganization. Madison responded that the reorganization sought not to replace them and other employees, but to redefine their performance.

''They`ve not been creative, they`ve not been told to let the creative juices flow, and haven`t been told it was more important than how many votes they could deliver in a precinct,'' Madison said.